Oblivion

What if all of your memories disappeared? Would you still long for the past?

“Is it possible to miss a place you’ve never been? To mourn a time you’ve never lived?”

-- Jack Harper, Oblivion

It might be tough. How many of us miss the “good old days”, the traditions of our grandparents, Jewish holidays we celebrating when we were kids? Or were they just created for an older time, and are now obsolete?

How many of us miss the “good old days”?

Oblivion is the newest mind-bending sci-fi movie, and it’s decent enough entertainment if you want to see Tom Cruise tackle himself, fall down holes, and be surprised by everything.

But critics don’t know why he’s surprised. They’re saying that it seems to be a rip-off of a host of other sci-fi movies.

But I don’t know why they’re saying that. All it is (SPOILERS AHEAD) is a futuristic story about a clone with false memories who finds a stasis pod from the past and has to team up with a wise man in sunglasses and help the rebels defeat the alien robot artificial intelligence who has taken over the earth, all just two weeks before his retirement. Also, the Statue of Liberty’s torch is down.

But Tom Cruise’s character, who, as usual, is named Jack, has had his memory wiped, so he’s never seen a sci-fi movie before. This is all new to him. In fact, that’s basically the first thing he tells the audience – that he’s been mind-wiped – which is a very strange thing to remember.

“I’ve been mind-wiped. But here’s a back story that’s probably not true.”

Jack is the last man on Earth. As the story goes, at some point before the movie – while you were watching the trailers, I guess – aliens attacked the Earth. We won the war, but everything’s destroyed, so now we can’t live there anymore either. All the people are gone, and Jack is left as the one-man clean-up crew. Like Wall-e, but slightly more human. He even has a little flower in a can. The surviving humans, meanwhile, are said to be living out in space, where they – I don’t know – float around in chairs or something. They’ve been exiled from their land, and they keep gaining weight. It’s a very relatable concept.

Jack’s main job is to maintain the drones, which are floating robots whose job it is to hunt down the last few remaining aliens, even though there are no people left on Earth, so who really cares at this point? But it’s the principle of the thing. He lives high above the clouds in a birdhouse with his partner, Victoria, a really nice pool, and a hamster wheel/treadmill thing so he could do some Tom Cruise sprinting every night.

But like Wall-e, Jack has developed a personality. And he’s curious. He starts noticing plot holes (Yes, the movie has so many plot holes that even the main character is noticing them):

“Wait. Why do I keep having dreams of being on Earth before the invasion if I wasn’t even born yet by then? If we won the war, why do we have to leave? When did we develop this enormous space station that probably took years to build? AFTER most of Earth was destroyed?”

Jack has memories of an Earth he isn’t old enough to remember. Even though he can visit whatever’s left, he yearns for what was. He looks at the ruins – at the landmarks crumbling in the dust, and he misses it. He feels a connection to the ruins that he can’t explain. And he feels alone.

Victoria, whose job it is to monitor him from their little “Jetsons” house and never actually sets foot in their homeland, doesn’t yearn for it. He gives her his Wall-e flower, and she throws it off the balcony.

(Flowers have an entirely different meaning in the future.)

“Our job is not to remember,” she says. “Remember?”

Um… No.

Judaism is all about remembering.

But Judaism is all about remembering.

It’s harder to remember what you lost if you never visit – when you can’t reach out and touch things, and when the slightest hint of your people’s past sends you running for the balcony. Jack sees every day what was lost, but Victoria doesn’t. How many people who’ve never been to Israel actually miss it?

Then one day, Jack stumbles across the underground human resistance, who live, well, underground, in the dark, and are narrated by Morgan Freeman. (Morgan Freeman plays “Morpheus”.)

Morpheus then tells Jack the truth – that the drones are actually part of the invading force, and the “remaining aliens” are actually the humans. What once was is gone, and what society says is good used to be thought of as bad. The world is upside down. But the truth was there before the lies. The lies are just piled on top, covering it. The truth is underground.

But here’s how you know the difference: The lies have plot holes. You’re not supposed to ask questions. Judaism on the other hand encourages asking questions, because that’s the only way to bring out the truth. There are no plot holes in Judaism, only questions that we haven’t dug deep enough to find out the answers to yet. And the best way to get those answers is to know who to ask.

Jack also finds out that he’s not actually Jack. He’s a clone of Jack, and there are thousands of other clones out there, each with their own sector to clean. And then the movie finds out that it’s a clone of several other movies.

Whoa.

But if he’s just a clone, is the earth still his home? In the world he knows, the planet always belonged to the aliens. After all, you’re born into a society that is what it is. Your memories of your traditions are just your parents’ memories. Or are they?

We’ve always had cloning technology, to some extent. After all, what are kids? They’re partial clones of their parents. They share your DNA, your looks, your values, and a lot of your life experiences and memories.

So you could say, “This isn’t my land. These aren’t my traditions. These aren’t my memories. They belong to my parents.” But it’s like cloning in a sci-fi movie: Even though it makes no sense, the clone somehow retains the memories of the original. It’s called “Lamarckism”, and it’s why kids these days know how to use computers right out of the womb, while you’re still typing with two fingers, because if you type with more, they get in the way and you can’t see the keys.

We’ve all been mind-wiped, over time, and have no idea what we’re missing. The world is constantly changing, and with them, so should traditions, right? But Oblivion is about hanging onto your traditions, despite the fact that you don’t really remember them being yours. It’s about longing for a time when it was obvious what was good and what was not. It’s about Morgan Freeman sitting around in the dark, wearing sunglasses.

The future is bright, apparently.

Judaism has always been about passing on traditions.

You know how in the movies, when you get rid of the parent alien, all the others just drop what they’re doing and keel over?

(Yeah, that happens in this movie too.)

But Jews are not like that. Like the resistance in Oblivion, there will always be more of us to carry on -- albeit scattered around the earth. We just can’t forget what we’re missing.

I've been striving to get more into spirituality. But it seems that every time I make some progress, I find myself slipping right back to where I started. I'm getting discouraged and feel like a failure. Can you help?

The Aish Rabbi Replies:

Spiritual slumps are a natural part of spiritual growth. There is a cycle that people go through when at times they feel closer to God and at times more distant. In the words of the Kabbalists, it is "two steps forward and one step back." So although you feel you are slipping, know that this is a natural process. The main thing is to look at your overall progress (over months or years) and be able to see how far you've come!

This is actually God's ingenious way of motivating us further. The sages compare this to teaching a baby how to walk. When the parent is holding on, the baby shrieks with delight and is under the illusion that he knows how to walk. Yet suddenly, when the parent lets go, the child panics, wobbles and may even fall.

At such times when we feel spiritually "down," that is often because God is letting go, giving us the great gift of independence. In some ways, these are the times when we can actually grow the most. For if we can move ourselves just a little bit forward, we truly acquire a level of sanctity that is ours forever.

Here is a practical tool to help pull you out of the doldrums. The Sefer HaChinuch speaks about a great principle in spiritual growth: "The external awakens the internal." This means that although we may not experience immediate feelings of closeness to God, eventually, by continuing to conduct ourselves in such a manner, this physical behavior will have an impact on our spiritual selves and will help us succeed. (A similar idea is discussed by psychologists who say: "Smile and you will feel happy.")

That is the power of Torah commandments. Even if we may not feel like giving charity or praying at this particular moment, by having a "mitzvah" obligation to do so, we are in a framework to become inspired. At that point we can infuse that act of charity or prayer with all the meaning and lift it can provide. But if we'd wait until being inspired, we might be waiting a very long time.

May the Almighty bless you with the clarity to see your progress, and may you do so with joy.

In 1940, a boatload 1,600 Jewish immigrants fleeing Hitler's ovens was denied entry into the port of Haifa; the British deported them to the island of Mauritius. At the time, the British had acceded to Arab demands and restricted Jewish immigration into Palestine. The urgent plight of European Jewry generated an "illegal" immigration movement, but the British were vigilant in denying entry. Some ships, such as the Struma, sunk and their hundreds of passengers killed.

If you seize too much, you are left with nothing. If you take less, you may retain it (Rosh Hashanah 4b).

Sometimes our appetites are insatiable; more accurately, we act as though they were insatiable. The Midrash states that a person may never be satisfied. "If he has one hundred, he wants two hundred. If he gets two hundred, he wants four hundred" (Koheles Rabbah 1:34). How often have we seen people whose insatiable desire for material wealth resulted in their losing everything, much like the gambler whose constant urge to win results in total loss.

People's bodies are finite, and their actual needs are limited. The endless pursuit for more wealth than they can use is nothing more than an elusive belief that they can live forever (Psalms 49:10).

The one part of us which is indeed infinite is our neshamah (soul), which, being of Divine origin, can crave and achieve infinity and eternity, and such craving is characteristic of spiritual growth.

How strange that we tend to give the body much more than it can possibly handle, and the neshamah so much less than it needs!